14 DAY TRIAL // The Apache web server continues to grow in popularity and it saw the biggest increase in hostnames using it again last month. Apache added 12.5 million hostnames in April, similar to the number it added in March as well. While most other web servers saw gains in the past month, Apache was by far the winner.
"In the May 2011 survey we received responses from 324,697,205 sites," the website monitoring firm Netcraft reported.
"Apache exhibited by far the largest growth this month, gaining 12.5M hostnames and over 1.5 percentage points of market share. SoftLayer saw the largest increase, gaining 3.0M hostnames, while Earthlink took a big drop, losing 1.3M," it wrote.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's IIS saw a much more modest growth of just 800,000 hostnames. In terms of market share, this meant that Microsoft's server software saw a drop, losing half of a percentage point in one month.
Other popular web servers saw an increase in absolute terms, but a drop in market share, due to the big growth exhibited by Apache. nginx added 381,000 hostnames and lighttpd only 21,000, but dropped by 0.16 percentage points and 0.02 percentage points respectively.
Google on the other hand added 1.5 million hostnames in the last month, contributing to a 0.30 percent points increase in market share.
"The Tōhoku Earthquake has not caused any significant drops in the number of sites seen by the survey, though Japan's growth this month of 231k hostnames was about two thirds of what was seen in March (345k) and April (389k)," Netcraft also said.
In terms of active servers, which are a fraction of the total number of hostnames, the picture is pretty much the same. Everyone saw some small gains, but Apache took the top spot as well.